SWIFT is always a busy week but thankfully
it includes scheduled time for personal writing. Following the daily log provided by Maria, I
sit and enjoy the personal writing time and I scribble the blog for Day 2; I am enjoying the looseness of blogging.
After personal writing there is coffee and
ridiculously good cookies; they have Smarties on top.
Over coffee I welcome Oona Frawley from the
Maynooth University English Department who has very graciously agreed to join
our group to talk about how she supports our student writers, how she
contributes to the institutional conversation on writing and what it’s like to
be a published author.
Oona is understated and apologies for her
Birks; with this we all feel a little less intimidated by the fact that there
is a *real* author in the room. We have
been performing ‘I am a writer’ since Monday; it is hard for us to make the
statement, unapologetically. Small
wonder that our undergraduate students and postgraduates, including doctoral
researchers, also find it difficult to declare themselves as writers. Inasmuch as we endeavour to demystify and
democratise writing, it seems to maintain an elusive quality as though what we do as writers, like this blogging, is
somehow inadequate in comparison to the work of a real writer/author. It isn’t even the fact of professional versus
amateur writing. Many of us are professional
writers in that our jobs involve a great deal of writing, across a range of
genres everyday, and we get paid to do that work.
Oona reads from Flight and we remember the pleasure of being told a story. I have people in my life who are fluent
readers, who ask to be read to, sometimes only to correct you or to remind you
that you’ve missed a bit: ‘You forgot the ‘great’, ‘In the “great” green room
there was a telephone …’ These stories
are known by heart and yet there is a longing to hear them.
We stop short of putting our heads on the
desk and listen to a story of place and displacement. Preceding the reading, Oona tells us of how
much place means to her; her American accent signals that she is not from here
though she is settled in Ireland. Her
remarks remind me how little I think of place except maybe in terms of how
comfortable it is. Place returns
throughout the week, chiming at regular intervals, calling us to stay,
compelling us to leave.
Oona talks of writing processes and how the
ways into creative writing can equally lead us into academic texts. She confides in the group her love for
creative writing and how it works alongside her achievements in academic
publishing. She notes how she wasn’t
swayed by the temptation of getting published at all costs and how she
maintained the integrity of waiting nearly 11 years to see her book in
print. I am reassured in all kinds of
ways.
We are so grateful for Oona’s time.
We continue the day, moving from a focus on
creative writing to one on academic writing with Mick’s demo. Mick works in further education (FE), a
sector with great diversity. He
valiantly tries to explain how FE works: I am sitting at the back wondering how
he will spell out what for me are indecipherable acronyms let alone describe
the sector.
Mick begins his demo reminding us of the
need for silliness. We create hybrid
animals of our own invention; we draw them and give them a name. Mick is unembarrassed sharing with us his
elephantorse; its interpretation benefits much from its labelling as
elephathorse. From his surreal pachyderm,
Mick continues his demo which involves the collaborative writing of an essay
type answer to a question about ICT. We
are in groups of 4 and we brainstorm a part of the answer. Each group focuses on one thing and when we
have worked on it for some time our ideas are recorded on the white board under
different headings. We discuss them and
then in our groups we each take a section, a group of ideas under a heading and
we freewrite a paragraph. We share these
with each other within our group.
Two features of the demo that appeal to me
are the fact that we answer the essay collaboratively and that we begin with
what we know in order to make our case.
We start trying to make an argument, we write a draft of what it could
look like, and then we explore where its potential lies, what direction we want
to take it in, what areas we need to explain further and particularly what
evidence we need to find in order to back up our claims. I have taught a lot of academic writing
classes but I’ve never used this exact approach; I add it, appreciatively, to
my portfolio and plan to use it in the coming academic year.
I make an indiscriminate gift of a signed
copy of Flight to Mick who has done
such a good job. He is chuffed J
After lunch Catherine brings us back to
primary school with her demo. We are
asked to think as though we are in primary school. We are given no further instruction. I see myself first in junior infants but then
in sixth class, not in the main building but in the convent itself. The convent has scented parquet floors
covered haphazardly with barely-there rugs that slide along the polished
surface. When you come up the steps and
through the too-small door, if you take a regretfully short run at it you can hit
the rug just right, and it takes you whooshing down past the reception room
door, up over the saddle board until you are stopped by an upright piano in the
hall next to the entrance to the parlour.
The group seems to love this exercise;
there is eagerness to share our young voices.
There is something low risk about speaking as we were; how we can’t
really be blamed for getting anything wrong if we are using our primary school
voice. This voice is not expected to be
sophisticated and error-free.
Catherine then shares a beautiful
illustration with us. It is of a mouse,
on steps to reach a Belfast sink in a room that Deirdre describes as the kitchen
of a PhD candidate, 2 months from submission.
It is chaotic. We are to write
about what’s in the picture; what do we see.
We are then to consider what happened before and what is to come. We are learning about sequencing in a story
and we are taken with the idea.
The two demos are wonderful. They are so different and yet we can see how
we can take elements from them and repurpose them for our context.
We leave the Library at the end of the day
having enjoyed the visit. Day 4 takes us
over the hump of the week and back to the north campus.
No comments:
Post a Comment